Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Bigger, better, faster, stronger

The Ryan house got rewired yesterday, with the help of a very nice guy named Mike who installed a new Fios system--internet, phone, cable, and DVR--that costs the same as our dodgy Comcast internet/cable plan that failed frequently and included no phone and no DVR.Apparently, Comcast was under the impression that their much-heralded "On Demand" programming would keep us in the fold even without the other extras, and were shocked--shocked!--to learn that round-the-clock access to movies like "The Last Mimzy" and exercise shows from the 1980s featuring Wayne Gretsky's wife weren't enough to secure our devotion. After three years of lost calls on my cell phone (not so great for business) and missed seasons of So You Think You Can Dance, the Fios people knew just the way to my heart.

The one problem with this delightful new arrangement was that Steve and I didn't own a phone. We've never had a landline; it's one of those things we just never got around to doing. But when Fios Mike asked for our phone so he could test it, we did what most people do--we went down to the basement, assuming we had one in storage. Doesn't everybody? Now mind you, this assumption had no basis in reality. Neither of us had a phone before we got married, and no one thought to add one to our gift registry. So we probably shouldn't have been quite so surprised to discover that our basement hadn't been sequestering one all this time, just waiting for us to come and appreciate it.

I dashed out to Best Buy with cash in hand, eager to rectify this situation. What I discovered was surprising. 90% of the cordless phones featured three or more handsets. Which is lovely and generous, but our condo is only 900 square feet. Multiple handsets seemed like a sure path to us becoming one of those couples who conducts all phone conversations in tandem, each weighing in from a different line. We're at least three decades away from that being practical (I think you need to be a grandparent) rather than utterly annoying, so I searched for other options.

Over in a corner, I found one lowly cordless option that came without brothers or sisters. It had approximately the same power (GHz?) as a small calculator. Sitting next to it was the other lone ranger, a sleek silver-gray model. That would look nice in the living room, I thought briefly, reaching to pick it up. Then my eye caught the tag below it. The price for the sleek phone? $1,000.00

Here's the deal: unless a phone can 1.) read moods and block you from making phone calls you might someday regret; and/or 2.) MAKE a guy call when he says he will, it's not worth $1,000.

So if you're someone I chat with regularly on the phone, expect a call from me from my new calculator. I'll hit "record" on the DVR and we can chat :)